How to Make the Most of Google Shopping Campaigns Before the Holidays

Will You Be Leveraging Google Shopping Campaigns To The Fullest This Holiday Season?

It’s fall time. Do you know what means? The holiday shopping season is literally right around the corner. Believe it or not, but your customers and prospects are already making their lists, checking them twice, and scoping out the sites and destinations where they’ll make their final purchases and conversions. Are you on that list?

With New Changes Comes New Obstacles

We here at OperationROI have talked about the Google Shopping Campaign shift, and how this effects your campaign strategy. Despite not really affecting your end-users much, there are changes behind the scenes that will impact you, including:

With all these changes, we recommend that the first step you take in preparing for the upcoming holiday season is to make sure you’re buddy-buddy with Google Shopping Campaigns. The clock’s ticking, so be sure that this is priority #1.

Google’s new Shopping Campaigns will allow you to get far more specific and precise with how you present your inventory to customers. But that means making sure that you have the necessary information for each category heading, and that you’re not missing any vital product information.

In short, you have to go through your feed with a fine tooth comb to make sure that you’re living up to Shopping Campaigns’ new expectations. We suggest you start with your top performing products, as those are the ones you’re most concerned with. Any products that are vital to your holiday strategy should also get top-billing.

Good, You’re Familiar With Google Shopping Campaigns And Have Worked On Your Feed. Now What?

Glad you asked. Once your feed is Google Shopping Campaign friendly, it’s time to focus your efforts on your campaigns. With every change comes the opportunity to reassess your current standings, and make the necessary changes to get to the next level. Take a look at all of your existing campaigns and figure out what is working (keep those!) and what isn’t working (fix them!).

We encourage you to incorporate custom labels (thanks, Google Shopping!), which will allow far more flexibility for your feeds than ever before.

It’s important that you define your campaign structure and set basic bidding strategies for your new Shopping Campaigns. If your products don’t have strong brand recognition, it’s a good idea to start grouping using Product Type.

Crawl Before You Walk. Test Before You Go Live.

With any transition, testing is a necessary part of the process. That way you don’t just dump bad habits and under performing campaigns into a new system. So, figure out which groups in your feed you plan on testing first . Once you have that all squared away, by golly it’s time to test! Pause your newly created Shopping campaigns except for the groups you’re testing. As part of your testing, be sure to establish CPC and conversion metrics and compare these results to your past campaigns (including your past PLA campaigns).

From Your Tests — A World Of Answers

The reason it’s a good idea to test your campaigns is to figure out what’s working, and what’s not. Your testing will show you which campaigns are performing well, and why, and it’ll also help you figure out why some campaigns are under performing. All of this information is important toward your future campaigns and may have you adjusting your business goals.

Now it’s time to unpause all of your other product groups. Compare these with your existing campaign performance and adjust bids and groups wherever necessary. Also, adjust your daily budget for new campaigns to around 25% less than your existing campaigns. Increase your budgets as your campaigns are optimized.

Embrace Google Shopping Campaigns, Because It’s Embraced You

The shift to Google Shopping Campaigns may come as an inconvenience for you, but seeing as it’s mandatory, you have little say in the matter. But that’s okay, because if handled properly, this will benefit your sales during the holiday season and beyond. It’s all in the preparation, which is where OperationROI can help. We work with online retailers in not only transitioning to Google Shopping Campaigns smoothly, but making sure that their new campaigns are optimized … and remain that way. Contact us at 1-888-277-5429 or fill out our contact form for more information.